Teaching German

Green party

"Bündnis 90/Die Grünen," Germany's environmentalist Green party, was founded in West Germany in 1980 with a strictly environmentalist and pacifist platform. It has changed a lot since then.

In broad strokes, the Green Party has a voter base of urban, well-educated, high-income earners. It abandoned its strict pacifist stance when it was junior coalition partner in an SPD-led government: In 1999, Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer got the party to back Germany's participation in the NATO bombing of Kosovo. The Greens pushed through a nuclear power phase-out and enacted laws easing immigration and same-sex civil partnerships. In the general election of 2013, the Greens won 63 seats out of 631 in the Bundestag, making them the fourth-most powerful party in the country, and the second-most powerful in opposition, behind the Left party. Recent DW content on the party and its leaders is collated on this page.